Why?
Health is one of our core values at Kisko. Our small indoor gym and the possibility to join a CrossFit gym at no cost has us covered, but what about other people?
While three of our colleagues are trying to solve your diet with FixMyDiet, we wanted to make moving fun.
In the modern world most of us live relatively sedentary lives. We don’t need to head out every morning to till the fields, never mind fending off predators or catching prey to eat.
The human body was meant to move and there’s plenty of research that suggests that exercise can be a powerful buffer against anxiety and depression. So how could we encourage us and others to move more than the bare minimum required? The answer was to tap into the competitiveness in everyone’s brains.
What?
KiskoFit sends its users on a mission to Mars. The best part is that there are other people who are competing with you to complete the mission before you do.
KiskoFit gathers your daily steps from your wearables or devices, and uses it to move you closer to successfully completing the mission.
The grand concept would be to support the majority of devices and wearables, but for the scope of the Kisko Health Hackathon we’ve only implemented support for Garmin Connect. So, will you be the first human on Mars, Commander?
The game-like interface and the competitive aspect of the service make KiskoFit really addictive. Two-thirds of our team own a Garmin device and since the hackathon we’ve started paying more attention to the amount of steps we are doing daily, always aiming for more to stay in the lead.
To make it more interesting you have to walk a minimum number of steps per day or you’ll notice your life support bar decreasing. If you accrue an exceptionally high number of steps in a week you get to use your ship’s thrusters to bring you to closer to Mars.
Who?
KiskoFit is aimed at anyone with a smartphone, smartwatch or any other kind of wearable that track movement. If you’re having trouble getting your daily steps in and would like to compete with your friends, this is the service for you!
Technical notes
The service was built on top of the Garmin Wellness API test environment. Once we open to public, anyone with a Garmin Connect account could authenticate to KiskoFit.
As well as integrating to the Garmin service, we tried to step outside of our normal comfort zone with the user interface. We experimented with features we don’t normally get to use, such as sound effects, animated SVGs, text effects and other game-like UI candy.
When?
Unfortunately KiskoFit is in its early development stages, after all we only had two days to come up with a plan and implement a working prototype. We hope to release the first public version in early 2016 but for the time being here’s a small video of some of what you can look forward to:
